Re: Potential GSOC microproject idea

[Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>]

On 03/09/2014 02:54 AM, Kyle J. McKay wrote:
> On Mar 3, 2014, at 23:58, Michael Haggerty wrote:
>> list
>> regulars should FEEL ENCOURAGED to submit microprojects to add to the
>> list.  (Either submit them as a pull request to the GitHub repository
>> that contains the text [1] or to the mailing list with CC to me.)
> 
> Potential idea for a microproject:
> 
> Add a new config setting:
> 
>   user.allowImplicitIdentity
>     Defaults to true.
>     If user.name and GIT_COMMITTER_NAME are unset or user.email and
>     GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL and EMAIL are unset, an implicit value is
>     substituted for one or both of user.name and user.email.  If
>     an automatically generated value is used for both name and email
>     a warning "Your name and email address were configured
> automatically..."
>     is displayed.  If set to false, no or never, instead of a warning,
>     an error is generated and the operation fails:
> 
>         *** Please tell me who you are.
> 
>         Run
> 
>           git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
>           git config --global user.name "Your Name"
> 
>         to set your account's default identity.
>         Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.
> 
>         fatal: implicit user identity not allowed
> 
>     the advice portion can be suppressed by setting
> advice.implicitIdentity to false,
>     but not the "fatal: implicit user identity not allowed" part.
> 
> Note that if "git config --system --bool user.allowImplicitIdentity
> false" is in effect, it should still be possible to clone (ref logs may
> be updated, but they should be allowed to use an implicit identity).  In
> other words user.allowImplicitIdentity=false should only inhibit writing
> any new commit/tag objects that need the current user's name and email
> when it has not been explicitly provided.
> 
> I'm not sure how micro this is.  :)  I do think the amount of code
> involved is rather small though.  Support for something like this has
> popped up on the list before.  Perhaps "user.allowAutomaticIdentity" and
> "advice.automaticIdentity" would be better config names.

This would be much more work than the other microprojects.  The ones
that I wrote were mostly one- or few-line changes that didn't require
the student to learn a lot of context.  (And most students struggled
mightily with even those.)  So I'm not sure this task is suitable.

Other feedback welcome.  We're pretty much out of microprojects, which
is possibly even worse than having difficult ones.

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/